Reviews

R670100A.  General Review Essay.

The Contemporary Review, January 1867, pp. 1–15; February 1867, pp. 133–148.

Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 391.

It is now thirty years since the publication of the first poem that bore Mr. Browning’s name on its title-page, and, with the one exception of the Laureate, no reputation has during that period advanced so steadily. If his popularity does not as yet approach that of Mr. Tennyson, if the readers of “Paracelsus” or the “Dramatis Personæ” are to be counted by thousands, and those of the “Idyls of the King” and “Enoch Arden” by tens of thousands, there are yet not wanting judges who, recognising the characteristic excellences of each, see in Mr. Browning, with all the drawbacks of obscurity, abruptness, and an indifference to beauty of form or subject amounting almost to scorn, some elements of a higher poetic greatness than they find even in the high thoughts and perfect melody of his great rival. If we may venture to forecast the history of English poetry during the coming quarter of a century, we are tempted to predict that, if the followers of the one are likely to be more numerous, those of the other will take a higher place and exercise a more lasting influence. If echoes of Tennysonian melodies float through the groves of Parnassus and are caught up by the young aspirants who [p. 2→] climb its slopes, there will be some who, treading more devious paths, the “avia Pieridum loca,” will show that they have followed their master to the wilder and more solitary crags, and learned from him to breathe their keener air. If, as the history of literature leads us to expect, a true poet, while he is more than the resultant of all poetic forces previously in operation, is yet, consciously or unconsciously, the heir of those that have gone before him,—taking up their excellences as part of the riches of his own treasury, talents with which he is to “occupy,” that the Giver may, at the last, receive His own with usury,—we may anticipate that the next representative poet of this century will show that he has learned lessons from both the great “masters of those who sing,” to whom we have listened. It may be idle to speculate on a perfection which lies beyond our reach, and we must remember, even in such speculations, that, as things are, the highest excellence in any art is never attained by any mere process of study and combination; but if one were to dream, Frankenstein-like, of the creation of a poet who should interpret the thoughts and meet the wants of this age of ours, we should be tempted to imagine one who should combine with the Laureate’s serener thought and more exquisite music, Mr. Browning’s power of perceiving and portraying, with dramatic vividness, the subtle processes of thought and feeling in the most widely contrasted characters. It is due to the honoured memory of a great name that we should give utterance, while we are living in this ideal cloud-land, to the wish, that the coming poet may inherit also from the author of the “Christian Year,” what is ethically higher than either of these gifts, and can as little be dispensed with in our conceptions of a perfect poetry,—his reverence for holiness as distinct from power, his sympathy with the gentler, more tender, more mystical and, as it were, sacramental aspects of Nature,—the heart as of a little child clinging to the skirts of his Father’s robe, and afraid, with a filial fear, of venturing beyond the boundaries of the home which his Father has assigned him. Imitation, of course, conscious or unconscious, of either poet is comparatively easy. As there are reproductions of Mr. Tennyson’s serene calmness and Mr. Browning’s abruptness, so there are, and will be, of Mr. Keble’s devotion; but these, in the absence of the higher vitality which can originate as well as combine, will simply pass, respectively, into luscious sweetness, or spasmodic obscurity, or sentimental pietism. And yet it will remain true that, in the genesis of the poet we are imagining, no one of these elements could be dispensed with without loss. If the conceit of Dryden’s epigram on “Paradise Lost,”—

The force of Nature could no farther go;

To form a third she joined the other two,”— [p. 3→]

fails to represent the process by which Homer and Virgil contributed to form a Milton, there is yet no doubt that he was far other than he would have been had they not written, and that much of what he wrote is distinctly traceable to them; and in like manner, it may be, the critics of the twentieth century will be able to point out the influence of Browning, Tennyson, and Keble on some bard who may at the present moment be in long clothes, or reading for honours by the banks of Cam or Isis, or, at the farthest, waiting with tremulous expectation for the decision of a publisher.

In entering, as we purpose to do, on an estimate of the writings of the poet whose name stands at the head of this article, it must be remembered that his fame, such as it is, has been attained under conditions singularly unfavourable. His first poem, “Paracelsus,” published in 1836, gave indeed promise of the highest excellence, and its merits were recognised by many critics, but “Strafford,” which appeared in 1837, in spite of all Mr. Macready’s efforts to perfect its representation on the stage, was unquestionably a failure there, and could hardly be said to have succeeded as a book; and the next poem, published in 1840, “Sordello,” was then and continues still, at once in the intricacy of its plot and the obscurity of its language, the most repellent of all his poems, perhaps of all poems ever written by a man of true poetic power. In vain, once and again, the reader, tempted by the delusive promise of the opening line,

Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,

girds himself to the task; in vain he tries to use the page-headings, which profess to give him an analysis of the history, as clues to guide him through the labyrinth; in vain he gets glimpses here and there of pictures sketched with a master’s hand, or even into that which forms the main theme, the story of the inner life of a character oscillating between the work of a minstrel and a soldier, writing poems or acting them. He remains to the last embarrassed and confused, uncertain as to the political relations of Ferrara and Mantua, of Ecelin and Azzo and Salinguerra, still more so as to the human life which is portrayed as developing itself on this stage and among these surroundings. It presents itself as a curious problem to an inquiring intellect. What would be the result of an examination paper in “Sordello,” set before competitors, let us say, for the Indian Civil Service, of average intellect and culture, who had been offered their choice of that or the “Mahabharata?” We do not now notice this characteristic as giving an adequate account of the poem itself, but as helping us to estimate its effect on Mr. Browning’s reputation. This, we think it will be allowed, was simply negative. It came as a minus, not a plus quantity, on his side of the account with readers and critics. They look, for the most part, [p. 4→] to a writer’s second and third works as decisive of his future career, indicating whether the first, if that were successful, was the beginning or the end, the promise of the work of a strong man or the exhausting effort of a precocious and fevered intellect; whether the author has had the wisdom to profit by experience, correcting his faults and developing his excellences, or takes to an evil mannerism in which the weeds of affectation and unreality choke the good seed of genius. What is most promising in the opening career of Mr. Robert Buchanan is that each volume that he has published since the first has been really an advance on its predecessor, and has been recognised as such. It will take Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, a long quarantine, even after the brilliant and deserved success of his “Atalanta in Calydon,” before he regains the position which he has forfeited by the pruriency of “Chastelard,” and the mingled misotheism and Messalinism of the volume which his first publisher wisely withdrew from a circulation on which they ought never to have ventured. “Sordello,” it need hardly be said, showed neither feebleness nor pruriency, but the defiance offered in it, not only to the conventional standard of form and structure and beauty, but to the craving of the reader for something more than a Chinese puzzle, enigma within enigma, was likely to be quite as perilous to the reputation of the writer.

The next stage in Mr. Browning’s progress, though it included many of his noblest works, had even less in its favour, as regards the usual outward conditions of success. Few poems of equal worth, probably, have ever presented themselves, for the first time, with so little regard to outward comeliness as those published between 1842 and 1846 under the quaint title of “Bells and Pomegranates.” Shilling numbers, appearing at irregular intervals, in yellow paper covers, with the small type and double columns which we just tolerate in collected editions of the works of great poets, but which we never learn to love;—it was in spite of these that Mr. Browning’s reputation had to struggle forward till it became fame. When we think of the care and cost lavished by Messrs. Moxon, and Strahan, and Macmillan, on the volumes of poetry which have issued from their presses during the last few years, it is hard to suppress a wish that a like attractiveness had been given to the works of a far greater poet than any they have lately introduced to us, still harder not to admire the genius and strength which could afford to do without it.

As it was, however, the years covered by the publication of “Bells and Pomegranates” were years, every way, of growth. They included many of the poems which his admirers most love, the whole series of the dramas and dramatic lyrics, which have since been [p. 5→] republished,* and though as yet the circulation was not large, the writer’s name became more and more known, and a welcome was secured for anything that might follow. In 1849, “Paracelsus” and most, if not all, of the poems which had appeared in “Bells and Pomegranates” were republished, without that somewhat affected title, and they were followed, in 1850, by what are in some respects the most characteristic and the highest in their aim of all, “Christmas Eve” and “Easter Day.” After an interval of five years, in 1855, with every mark of full maturity and power, appeared two volumes, under the title of “Men and Women,” including, among other memorable poems, the “Epistle of Karshish,” “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” and the wonderful completion of “Saul.” Then came another collected republication of these, and all previously printed, in 1863, followed by the “Dramatis Personæ” in 1864. The strength of one who is not impatient for popularity and can afford to wait, while others of far inferior power catch the clamorous applause of the day, had at last done its work. The more authoritative Reviews, which are supposed to constitute the highest critical tribunal** in our courts of literature, at last, with various degrees of heartiness and discernment, recognised the fame which had been won without them; and though Longfellow and Tupper are still, perhaps, the favourite poets of middle-class readers, there is hardly a sixth-form boy or undergraduate of any culture who would not bracket together the names of Tennyson and Browning as the great poets of our time, and discuss with his fellows, in study talks or at debating clubs, which of the two stands on the highest level of excellence.

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*It may interest those who only know the poems in their later forms to learn in what order they appeared in this series:—

I. Pippa passes.

II. King Victor and King Charles.

III. Dramatic Lyrics.

IV. The Revolt of the Druses.

V. The Blot on the ’Scutcheon.

VI. Colombe’s Birthday.

VII. Romances and Lyrics.

VIII. Luria and the Soul’s Tragedy.

It may be noted further (1) that some of the shorter poems thus published, “Rudel” and “Cristina,” were then grouped under the head of “Queen-Worship,” and are now printed far apart; (2) that one of the most startling of all Mr. Browning’s writings, “Porphyria,” which is now left to explain itself, then appeared in Part III. as one of a series of poems under the title of “Madhouse Cells,” and so had its tale half-told in advance; (3) that Part VII. included the magnificent fragment of “Saul,” which, with a rare felicity, the author afterwards completed, so that it became, as we venture to think, the noblest utterance of his genius.

**By far the ablest of these notices, in many respects a satisfying critical estimate of Mr. Browning’s characteristics as a poet, is to be found in the National Review, vol. xlvii. The Edinburgh Review, in 1864, has “a sincere respect for Mr. Browning’s literary industry,” but finds it “a subject of amazement that poems of so obscure and uninviting a character should find numerous readers;” and thinking “his works deficient in the qualities we should desire to find (in) them,” does not believe they “will survive, except as a curiosity and a puzzle.”

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Mr. Browning has himself portrayed with his usual vividness, in [p. 6→] what, so far as we know, is the one prose publication that bears his name, the desire which we feel to be able to connect a public career like that which has just been traced with the facts of the writer’s life. Speaking of one whose genius, like his own, is essentially creative, he says:—

“We ask, did a soul’s delight in its own extended sphere of vision set it, for the gratification of an insuppressible power, on labour, as other men are set on rest? Or did a sense of duty or of love lead it to communicate its own sensations to mankind? Did an irresistible sympathy with men compel it to bring down and suit its own provision of knowledge or of beauty to their narrow scope? Did the personality of such an one stand like an open watch-tower in the midst of the territory it is erected to gaze on, and were the storms and calms, the stars and meteors its watchman was wont to report of, the habitual variegations of his every-day life, as they glanced across its open roof, or lay reflected on its four-square parapet?”*

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*“Introductory Essay to Shelley’s Letters,” published by Moxon in 1852. The letters afterwards turned out to be forgeries—hardly, we think, clever ones; but the value of the Essay remains unaffected by the discovery.

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For us, however, strong as may be the wish to know—stronger in proportion to the rare fortune which brought together in this case, as husband and wife, two minds so singularly gifted,—reverence for the sanctity of home-life, and for the sorrow of one who is still living in the midst of us, is stronger still; and, much as we may speculate in our thoughts on the influence which the poet and poetess, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, exercised on each other’s minds, we must pass, after one tribute of mournful admiration to the memory of the one, to deal with the other, with no other knowledge and on no other data than such as are publici juris in his writings.

We are disposed to commence this inquiry with the solitary prose essay from which we have already quoted rather than from any of Mr. Browning’s poems. It is characteristic of his genius (if we may be permitted to use one of the cant words of the day) that he is the least subjective, in other words, the least egoistic of poets. He impersonates a thousand characters. He seldom speaks to us in his own. His verse does not tell us (except as the result of a wide induction) what he aims at, what are his thoughts as to the calling of a poet, and the conditions of the highest excellence attainable by him. The paper of which we speak in part fills up the blank. Writing of Shelley, the English poet of whom he speaks with most reverence,—

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?—

he is led to treat of poetry in general, and of the relation in which a great poet stands to his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. [p. 7→] From this preface, accordingly, we learn what Mr. Browning has deliberately recognised as the principles of his art, just as we learn from Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” what determined him in his choice of subjects and mode of treatment, or find in Mr. Keble’s “Prælections” on the “Vis medica” the “healing and soothing influence” of true poetry, or his article on Sacred Poetry in the Quarterly Review, No. lxiii,* what he deliberately aimed at in his tenderness and beauty. In each case a comparison of the principles with the results attained will show some successes and some failures. Possibly the failures will be found to be fewest, the successes most complete, when the writer was thinking least about his principles, and when therefore they were fashioning his thoughts and language most entirely.

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*It seems worth while to give a few characteristic excerpta from the article in question:—“If grave, simple, sustained melodies—if tones of deep but subdued emotion, are what our minds naturally suggest to us upon the mention of sacred music, why should there not be something analogous, a kind of plain chant, in sacred poetry also? fervent, yet sober; awful, but engaging. … The worshippers of Baal may be rude and frantic in their cries and gestures; but the true Prophet, speaking to or of the true God, is all dignity and calmness. … One great business of sacred poetry, as of sacred music, is to quiet and sober the feelings of the penitent.” Of all English poets, Spenser is for him “pre-eminently the sacred poet of his country.” The “Fairy Queen” is “a continual deliberate endeavour to enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling on an inquiring and romantic age, on the side of goodness and faith, of purity and justice.” Milton he characterizes as “partaking largely of the vindictive and republican spirit which he has assigned to Satan,” and showing “a want of purity and spirituality in his conception of heaven and its joys.

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Thus, to take one instance, Mr. Browning, speaking of the class of writers to which he himself belongs,—objective, dramatic, realistic,—dwells on “the poet’s double faculty of seeing external objects more clearly, widely, and deeply than is possible to the average mind; at the same time that he is so acquainted and in sympathy with its narrower comprehension as to be careful to supply it with no other materials than it can combine into an intelligible whole.” It is of course true that this faculty is a condition of excellence, that a poet who is not understood fails of his end; but one is tempted to ask whether Mr. Browning’s estimate of the “average mind” leads him to think that it is capable of “combining into an intelligible whole” the materials with which he has presented it in “Sordello”? Perhaps, however, the Augustinian rule, distingue tempora, will come to our aid in answering this question. This may, we think, be fairly regarded as of the nature of a Palinodia, an indirect confession that he had learned wisdom from the comparative failure of what had almost every merit but this one of being intelligible, and was resolved for the future, not indeed to take the beaten paths, but to mount up on slopes, and by crags, where adventurous readers could at least [p. 8→] follow him. They may still have Alps to climb, but they are no longer defied and baffled by a Matterhorn.

Having thus spoken of the objective poet, he passes on to the idealist. Of him Mr. Browning speaks in words which have somewhat of the Æschylean grandeur of his own verse:—

“Not what man sees but what God sees, the ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine hand,—it is towards these he struggles. … He is a seer rather than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an affluence.”

There is, he adds, “no reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works.”

He is constrained to add, however, that as yet there has been no example of this union. The two elements have mingled in different proportions in many writers. No one has yet produced from the same pen the highest masterpieces. Mr. Browning might, we think, have pointed to the wonderful myriad-minded objectivity of the plays of Shakspere as contrasted with the intense subjectivity of the sonnets, as the nearest approach in the history of literature to the union or succession of which he speaks.* We venture to express the hope that the passing notice that such a thing was possible implies that he himself was aiming at it—that he thought, at least, that he might one day thus complete his task. Few gifts would be more precious than a book in which he would lay aside the mask for once, resist the temptation to add to the endless series of his “Dramatis Personæ,” and tell us, as Mr. Tennyson has done in “In Memoriam,” what he himself has thought, and felt, and believed on the problems of man’s life and of the universe. One great charm of his later poems is, as we shall see, that they approximate more closely to this excellence than did the earlier.

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*On Mr. Gerald Massey’s theory as to the Sonnets, they, of course, are themselves, for the most part, essentially and intensely dramatic, and reveal but little of Shakspere’s own history and feeling. But that theory, ingenious as it is, and much as we are disposed to believe what professes to clear a dark and painful mystery, seems to us to fail when we bring it to a crucial instance. It is hardly credible that Sonnet XX. could have been written for Elizabeth Vernon, or indeed for any woman, as “an interested and loving listener;” and we are compelled to fall back, however reluctantly, on Mr. Hallam’s judgment (“History of Literature,” iii, chap. 5), that the whole series, marvellous as are its melody of language and subtle grace of thought, belongs to a strange and morbid phase of feeling. So interpreted, they exhibit, we believe, a coherent, though a sufficiently painful history. The period to which the “Venus and Adonis” and the “Rape of Lucrece” belong, was obviously one of sensuousness and lubricity of thought; and with him especially in his earlier plays, as with the other dramatists of his time, there is a strange delight in dwelling even on the more repulsive features of impure life, and allusive jesting, such as passed current in the stews, crops up too frequently everywhere. Even when the fermentation was over, and the good wine was cleared, there was a twang of the old life in it. [p. 9→]

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Not less suggestive, as unconsciously autobiographical, are the words in which he describes the gradual degeneracy that follows on the absence of originating and creative power. A “school” gets formed on the model of a great poet; “living on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year’s harvest.”* Then, at last, unless there is absolutely no hope of recovery from this imbecility, a new poet rises up, “prodigal of objects for men’s outer and not inner sight,” replacing, with his fresh imagery and new objects, “this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago.” Few readers, we think, will fail to recognise in Mr. Browning one whose influence on their minds has been of this character; and far removed as we believe the egotism of thus writing of himself would be from his character, the words point, we believe, also to what he aimed at, still more at what he purposed resolutely to avoid, and so throw light on what is most characteristic in his poetry. The poets of a past generation, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordworth, had passed away, and young men of thought and culture, to whom the words of this one or that among them had been as a spell, unsealing their eyes and teaching them to look on nature and on man, or into their own souls, with [p. 10→] new insight, were fashioning themselves after their model, as men of like calibre are reproducing the tones of Tennyson and Browning now. But he, for his part, resolved to be no gatherer of sheaves in fields which had been sown by others, no disciple of any Rabbi or Rabban in the schools of literature; and he brought with him the power to see and speak, which made the resolve, not, as it too often is, a spasmodic straining after a spurious originality, but the source and spring of a new excellence. Of all the poets of our time he is the least imitative, the least conventional. Sometimes, we may be allowed to think, he seems, like the school of artists who have been most conspicuous for their protest against the traditions of routine, to have “o’erleapt the mark and fallen on the other side,” outraging the love of beauty, which is more than a mere acquiescence in decorum, by a deliberate preference for the ugly, the grotesque, the horrible.

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*Few better examples of the difference in form and feeling between our two greatest living poets can be given than the short poems in which they have respectively embodied almost identically the same thought. Mr. Tennyson, in “The Flower,” says gracefully of himself what others have often said of him,—

Once in a golden hour

I cast to earth a seed;

Up there came a flower,

The people said a weed.

To and fro they went

Through my garden bower,

And muttering discontent,—

Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall,

It wore a crown of light,

But thieves from o’er the wall

Stole the seed by night.

Sowed it far and wide

By every town and tower,

Till all the people cried

“Splendid is the flower!”

Read my little fable,

He that runs may read,

Most can raise the flower now,

For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,

And some are poor indeed,

And now again the people

Call it but a weed.

Mr. Browning, in his “Popularity,” starts with a different parable:—

I’ll say—a fisher on the sand

By Tyre the old, with ocean plunder

A netful brought to hand,

Who has not heard how Tyrian shells

Enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes

Whereof one drop worked miracles,

And coloured like Astarte’s eyes

Raw silk the merchant sells?

. . . . .

Enough to furnish Solomon

Such hangings for his cedar-house,

That, when gold-robed he took the throne

In that abyss of blue, the Spouse

Might swear his presence shone.

Most like the centre spike of gold

Which burns deep in the bluebell’s womb,

What time with ardours manifold,

The bee goes singing to her groom,

Drunken and over-bold.

Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof!

Till cunning comes to pound and squeeze

And clarify,—refine to proof

The liquor filtered by degrees,

While the world stands aloof.

And there’s the extract, flasked and fine,

And priced and saleable at last;

And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes and Nokes combine

To paint the Future from the Past,

Put blue into their line.

Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats;

Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup:

Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,—

Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?

What porridge got John Keats?

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There is much truth, at any rate, in the warning words in which he paints the results of the absence of any true originality:—

“All the bad poetry in the world … shows a thing, not as it is to mankind generally, nor as it is to the particular describer (sc., has neither the excellence of objective nor that of subjective poetry), “but as it is supposed to be for some unreal, neutral mood, midway between both, and of value to neither, and living its brief minute through the indolence of whoever accepts it, or his incapacity to denounce a cheat.”

We must find room, before we pass on to Mr. Browning’s poetry, for yet another extract, in which—in words which, if they are sometimes obscure, are throughout noble—he tells us what are his thoughts as to the calling and office of a poet. Here also we seem to trace the secret of much that is most characteristic in him, indications of the ideal at which he aimed, and nothing short of which can ultimately satisfy him. If readers find the length of the one sentence which forms the extract somewhat unmanageable and oppressive, we may plead that we have given them little more than half of that sentence as it appears in the original. He speaks there of—

“The whole poet’s function of beholding with an understanding keenness the universe, nature, and man in their actual state of perfection in imperfection; the whole poet’s virtue of being untempted by the manifold partial development of beauty and good on every side into leaving them the ultimates he found them, induced by the facility of the gratification of his own sense of those qualities, or by the pleasure of acquiescence in the shortcomings of his predecessors and the pain of disturbing their conventionalisms; the whole poet’s virtue, I repeat, of looking higher than any manifestation yet made of both beauty and good in order to suggest from the utmost actual realization of the one a corresponding capability in the other, and out of the calm, purity, and energy of nature, to reconstitute and store up for the forthcoming stage of man’s being, a gift in repayment of that former gift, in which man’s own thought and passion had been lavished by the [p. 11→] poet on the else incompleted magnificence of the sunrise, the else uninterpreted mystery of the lake, so drawing out, lifting up, and assimilating this ideal of a future man, thus descried as possible, to the present reality of the poet’s soul already arrived at the higher state of development, and still aspirant to elevate and extend itself, in conformity with its still improving perceptions of, no longer the eventual human, but the actual Divine.”

Whatever doubt may hang upon the meaning of parts of this; however strong may be our wish that some practised hand would break it up into shorter and more intelligible sentences, we feel as we read it that our hearts burn within us. The man who so speaks, if he is true to himself, will have no light thoughts or poor estimate of the work which he has gifts to accomplish. He is “the heir of all the ages,” and he is bound to transmit that inheritance, enlarged, widened, and enriched, to those that follow him. And in proportion as he rises to the thought of a human excellence higher than any he has known, he learns also not to lose himself in a dream of merely human progress and perfectibility, but to rest in the thought of what God is and what He works, to find Him “not far from every one of us.” A new light is thrown upon nature when it is thought of as the veil through which we see glimpses of His glory. A new light is thrown upon the life of man when we think of it as part of a Divine order, working out His will.

We pass to Mr. Browning’s better known works. And here, difficult as it is to label and group works which are not written to be classified in a museum, we think it will help us to attempt some kind of generic division. Mr. Browning’s own classification of his shorter poems under “Lyrics,” “Romances,” “Men and Women,” does not seem to us a very felicitous one. The romances and lyrics might change places almost ad libitum, and every one of them might legitimately come under the last title. It will not be thought altogether an artificial arrangement if we take them in the following order:—

I. Poems dramatic in their structure.

II. Lyrics and Romances, dramatic in character though not in structure, and dealing chiefly with passions which have man, as such, for their object.

III. Poems representing forms, true or false, healthy or morbid, of religious life.

Wishing, as we do, to attempt an estimate of the influence which Mr. Browning is likely to exercise on the thought and feeling of our own time in that which is of deepest moment, and to compare it with that of the other two poets whom we have named as “equalled with him,” we do not say in power, but at least in “renown” and the extent of their influence, we shall venture to treat of the last-named group with what would otherwise be a disproportionate fulness. [p. 12→]

I. In the one instance in which, so far as we know, Mr. Browning encountered the ordeal of dramatic representation, the result was confessedly a failure, and most readers of his other dramas will probably agree in feeling that they would rather read them than see them acted; that they require more effort of thought than is compatible with the conditions of the stage; that, even as dramas to be read, they move somewhat heavily. The special excellence of his genius is not that which enables him to exhibit the thoughts and passions of men in continuous action one upon another, or even to present the story which forms the framework of a drama with the clearness for which a spectator or reader naturally looks. Given a character with some marked idiosyncracy, the more morbid and exceptional the better, and a combination of circumstances, also exceptional and strange, and the soliloquy in which he will paint all the marvellous windings and shiftings of thought, the intensities and ferocities of passion, the mingling of high and low, noble and base, will hold us spell-bound by its subtle power and startling truthfulness. But when soliloquy passes into dialogue, we feel that this morbid anatomy interferes with its life and naturalness. He shows us how people think rather than how they speak. The privilege of a dramatic “aside” is stretched to its utmost tether in order to enable hearers to watch with a minute introspection the inner working of each agent’s mind. We are kept perpetually on the stretch, piecing together half-dropped hints and fragmentary sentences, watching for the links of the story which form the plot, and too often getting but a dim notion of it at last. Wearisome and monotonous as is the Euripidean plan of opening a tragedy with a précis of the state of affairs in general up to the commencement of the action of the drama, we are at times tempted to wish for some such clue to guide us through the mazes of Mr. Browning’s labyrinths. The popularity of “Pippa passes” as compared with the “Revolt of the Druses” or the “Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” is, we think, an illustration of what has just been said. For here there is no plot, but only a series of pictures, and short, almost momentary action in each of them, and there is a prologue which announces the whole structure of the coming poem. Pippa, a girl of Asolo, wakes up to her New Year’s holiday. She will make the most of it:—

This one day I have leave to go,

And play out my fancy’s fullest games;

I may fancy all day—and it shall be so

That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names

Of the Happiest Four in Asolo.

And she tells the story of these Four as she sees it, and then goes forth on her day’s enjoyment. Each scene is brought before us, all the hot passion, and wild mirth, and yearning sorrow, and treacherous world- [p. 13→] liness of which the girl knew so little; and as she “passes,” singing in her innocent, unconscious joy, her words fall on men’s hearts with a strange power to bless, as calling them to purity, truth, courage, reverence. She has come into closest contact with passions which she never knew, with vileness from which her purity would have shrunk; she has altered the whole current of lives which seemed at an infinite distance from her, and she returns to her room at night, little knowing what she has done, and sings herself to sleep with the hymn with which she began the day, and of which its events since the morning have been so wonderful an illustration:—

All service is the same with God—

With God, whose puppets, best and worst,

Are we: there is no last nor first.

Next to this in clearness, with nothing but the simplest of plots, and with hardly more than two characters, one playing on and unfolding the weakness of the other, is “A Soul’s Tragedy.” A mob-leader, claiming the merit of a deed of patriotic vengeance which was not his, trading on the fame of it, rising to supreme power, then losing in that falsehood all true nobleness, becoming sensual, corrupt, servile, till at last the astute Machiavellian politician who has seen “twenty-three leaders of revolutions,” entraps him in his own snare, puts him to shame, and registers him as the “twenty-fourth;”—this moves on simply and naturally enough, and the reader is never embarrassed, as in the other plays, by vain efforts to recollect what has gone before, and connect it with what is coming next. In one point, however, the “Soul’s Tragedy” stands almost alone in its departure from the conventional type of tragedy. It has, of course, been common enough to mingle blank verse and prose in the same drama, leaving the latter to the less noble, assigning the former to the more heroic characters. Here, however, Mr. Browning wishes to symbolize the truth that the noble aspirations of the patriot degenerate into the ignoble baseness of the ambitious demagogue, and he does so by making everybody discourse in verse in the first part of the play, and, with an equal uniformity, talk prose in the second. As with every bold stroke of art, there is, at first, a certain effectiveness in this, but the second and permanent impression which it leaves is that there is something of the nature of a trick in it, true neither to the ideal of poetry nor the reality of actual life. We are compelled to look on it as an exemplar vitis imitabile.

We would fain speak more fully of our author’s other dramas, but our limits warn us that we must be brief, and we must leave all but “Strafford” and “Paracelsus” unnoticed. These are at once the most interesting in their subjects, and the most conspicuous for their power. The former has the additional interest of challenging com- [p. 14→] parison with a tragedy on the same subject by another writer, who, if his life had been prolonged, and energy and brightness had ripened into strength, might have occupied one of the foremost places in the literature of our time. As it is, those who were not his personal friends remember John Sterling chiefly in connection with other names, with those of Hare and Carlyle, and Maurice and Trench; but had his tragedy of “Strafford,” published in 1843,* been the first of a progressive series instead of standing by itself, he would have won, long ere this, the fame which his early associates seem to have so confidently expected for him. As it is, we think, most readers will find his “Strafford” at least the easier of the two. Living as are many touches of Mr. Browning’s portraiture of the stern but not relentless Wentworth, and interesting as are the features to which he gives prominence of an early friendship between him and Pym, and of passionate devotion to him on the part of Lady Carlisle, the play suffers from the intricacy of plot, the multitude of half-spoken thoughts, and dark hints, which we have before noticed as characteristic of all Mr. Browning’s dramas. We question, however, whether the subject was well chosen by either dramatist. Attractive as are the great characters and great events of history to a writer of essentially dramatic genius, he needs to remember that these are precisely the subjects which are most familiar to his readers, and in which therefore they expect most, and are most likely to be disappointed, whether the author reproduces what they know already, or startles long-cherished feelings by a divergence from it. We know the great scenes of Strafford’s life,—how he wrote to Laud and Charles (neither writer, by the way, seems to have utilized the “thorough” correspondence with the former as he might have done),—what he spoke at his trial; and the dramatist is therefore exposed to the risk of telling a twice-told tale, or, if he seeks to escape that difficulty by fixing on an episode in his life, of giving a factitious importance to what is in itself subordinate. History must absolutely, or relatively, be remote enough to have lost somewhat of the precision of its outline before it can safely be taken by any but a poet of the highest order—even if by him—as the subject-matter of a drama. In proportion to the greater fulness with which we know the history of the last three centuries in all their details is the difficulty of so treating them. The Revolution of 1688 would be a far more difficult subject for a dramatic writer of our own time than the Wars of the Roses were for Shakspere.

________

*It is singular that a writer like Sterling, living in close contact with the current literature of the time, should have brought out his “Strafford” without any reference to Mr. Browning’s, though the latter had been published six years before. If this apparent ignorance were also real, it is a striking instance of the slow progress of Mr. Browning’s reputation. [p. 15→]

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“Paracelsus” stands on a very different footing, and is a singularly happy result, at once of close research into the life of a comparatively unknown thinker, and of the power, out of a few scattered hints, to exhibit at least an ideally true portrait of the man. A byword, hitherto, for the worst forms of charlatanry, so that his very name, Bombastus, has been stamped on the inflated language of impostors and braggadocios,—just keeping his place in biographical dictionaries as having introduced the medicinal use of antimony and calomel and laudanum, he becomes, in Mr. Browning’s hands, the type of genius, with its high hopes and ambitions struggling upwards, and its love of fame, power, enjoyment dragging it downwards; oscillating this way and that; turning to the memory of friendship with purer and simpler souls, sympathizing with the power to enjoy which he himself has lost. In many respects, of course, the dramatic development of such a character reminds us of the opening scenes of “Faust,” and it is hard to think that Mr. Browning would have written as he did but for the influence of the marvellous and, if one may so speak, quickening and generative power of that poem. In Mr. Browning’s drama, however, there is a special feature, and one of great beauty. The love of knowledge in “Paracelsus” is contrasted, not as in “Faust” with the mocking demon of sensuality and scepticism, and the simple child-like innocence of Margaret, but, as in the character of Aprile, with a soul loving art and beauty for their own sakes, resting in them as ends with a passionate and intense delight. We know of no portraiture, in the whole range of Mr. Browning’s poetry, more unique and original than this, and it is drawn not only, as are all his characters, with a Shaksperian power, but with a wonderful tenderness and beauty. [p. 133→]

II. The noblest of all Mr. Browning’s lyrics and romances, “Saul,” we postpone, as coming more fitly under the last head of our classification. Of the second, our first notice must be in words at once of admiration for their versatility and power, and, we are constrained to add, of regret also, and of a feeling which, but that it has become familiar, would be disappointment. We do not expect every poet to be an Arndt or a Burns, but we are compelled to confess that we sigh, as we read these poems, for a somewhat stronger flavour of nationality. No poet of equal power (Byron, perhaps, excepted) has done so little to represent and to ennoble English thought and life; and the absence of this element from Mr. Browning’s poems will, we fear, always stand in the way of his attaining the place in the affections of the English people to which they have welcomed Mr. Tennyson. The Laureate turns, at once by instinct and by deliberate choice, to English scenes and characters. The “Talking Oak,” the “Gardener’s Daughter,” the “May Queen,” “Maud,” “Enoch Arden,” “Aylmer’s Field,” “Sea Dreams,” will occur to every one as examples. Even the Arthurian cycle of idyls gives to the king of British legend a far more ideally English character than the “Morte d’Arthur,” upon which they are raised as on a foundation. And the “In Memorian,” the most intensely personal of poems, is the history of a friendship which in its essence and in its circumstances, [p. 134→] would not have been what it was, without the recollections of the school and the college, the country house and the village church, which are specially characteristic of this country. With Mr. Browning, on the other hand, the poems, with one or two exceptions, that cling to one’s memory, are all thoroughly Italian. Pictures, with Mieris-like minuteness of detail, of the life of Italy in “Up at a Villa,” “Down in the City,” “The Englishman in Italy,” and “By the Fireside;” of its union of æsthetic culture with hateful vindictiveness in “My Last Duchess,” and with ecclesiastical debasement in “The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed’s Church;” of its higher and lower forms of art-life in “Old Pictures of Florence,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” and “The Guardian Angel;” of its phases of passionate love, and yet more passionate jealousy, in “Two in the Campagna,” “In a Gondola,” “In a Balcony,” and a “Serenade at the Villa,”—all these (to say nothing of many poems which are either Italian in their feeling or their circumstances, though not in both) come to one’s mind at once, while there are but few to balance them connected in any way with the history, life, characteristic feelings of our country. Mr. Browning seems to have lived so long under brighter skies, and amid a people of more glowing temperament, that English life is tame and cold to him. If this gives an intensity to his representations of emotions which are not national but human, to the mingling of love, disappointment, jealousy, despair, the transitions by which passionate idolatry passes into terrible scorn or cynical indifference, which he is so fond of painting, and which he paints (as in “Any Wife to any Husband,” “A Woman’s Last Word,” “In a Year,” “James Lee”) with such a wonderful insight into the morbid physiology of passion, we still feel some touch of regret that so great a poet has been so far denationalized. The intensity itself, belonging, as it does, to the South rather than to the North, makes his poems harder for Englishmen and Englishwomen to understand. There is a wisdom, as Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Tennyson have consciously or unconsciously recognised, in the old counsel, “Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna.” Rydal Mount and Faringford have proved themselves better poets’ homes even than the fair city on the banks of the Arno.

It is interesting to note the exceptions to this rule in the instances in which Mr. Browning’s path has led him across the history of other nations than the land of his adoption. “Strafford” brought him into the heart of the great conflict between despotism and freedom; and although we do not find, either in that play or elsewhere, any adequate appreciation of the Puritan character (that character is hardly visible even in his Pym or Vane), yet the “Lays of the English Cavaliers” show how thoroughly he entered into the spirit of [p. 135→] one party in that struggle. Even in “The Lost Leader” we seem to hear an echo of the lament of the Commons over Wentworth’s defections transferred to the circumstances and politics of our own time. We know not what individual leader, if any, Mr. Browning had in view; but if the early admirers of the French Revolution had wished to utter their hearts over the Toryism of Wordsworth or Southey, or the Chartists and Christian Socialists of 1848 over Mr. Kingsley’s panegyric on the peerage and his vindication of martial law ad libitum, they could hardly find fitter language. Those who care, not to point out how a poet repeats himself, but how a noble thought presents itself under different aspects will find it interesting to compare a few lines from each. Pym, in “Strafford,” speaks of the old love and hope which he had cherished for the Wentworth of his early days:—

Yes, I will say

I never loved but one man,—David not

More Jonathan! Even thus I love him now;

And look for my chief portion in that world

Where great hearts led astray are turned again,

. . . . . . . .

In my inmost heart,

Believe, I think of stealing quite away

To walk once more with Wentworth—my youth’s friend,

Purged from all error, gloriously renewed.

“The Lost Leader” ends thus in the same note:—

Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,—

Forced praise on our part,—the glimmer of twilight,

Never glad, confident morning again.

Best fight on well, for we taught him,—strike gallantly,

Menace our heart ere we master his own;

Then let him receive the new knowledge, and wait us

Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne.

Something of the same kind of connection, that of belonging to the same time and growing out of the same studies, we find between “A Grammarian’s Funeral” and “Paracelsus.” As the latter gives the portraiture of a man mingling thirst for knowledge with lower ambition, and finding therefore that all is vanity, so the former exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon’s friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some one region of knowledge, and content to labour without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook:—

Oh, if we draw a circle premature,

Heedless of far gain;

Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure,

Bad is our bargain!

Was it not great? Did not he throw on God

(He loves the burthen), [p. 136→]

God’s task to make the heavenly period

Perfect the earthen?

Did not he magnify the mind, show clear

Just what it all meant?

He would not discount life, as fools do here,

Paid by instalment.

We must hasten on; but before passing to the last division of our inquiry we must glance at what seem to us at once among the most powerful and the least pleasing of Mr. Browning’s poems. With a taste which reminds one of Teniers or Callot in their wildest and most grotesque moments, he appears sometimes to revel in what is horrible, repulsive, mentally or even physically loathsome. It is true that this never takes the form which, in a sensational artist of a lower kind, it would have done, and (with the exception of one scene in “Pippa passes”) there is scarcely a passage in his poems from first to last which ministers to lubricity of thought. But with the exception of that perilous region, there is hardly any other abyss of man’s nature from which he shrinks. The demoniac malignity of persecution as in “The Heretic’s Tragedy,” the festering squalor of the Ghetto in “Holy Cross Day,” the animal ferocity of hatred in the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” the revelling in mould and mildew in “Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis”—these, though we cannot but recognize the titanic strength which they display, we feel that we could well spare. It is part of the same humour that we find in him (the comic extravaganza of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” and the “Flight of the Duchess” are the most conspicuous specimens) a rollicking, revelling delight in strange and, it might seem, almost impossible rhymes. “Porringer” and “month” would be trifles to one who can give us—

And the mother smelt blood with her cat-like instinct,

As her cheek quick whitened through all her quince-tinct.

So glancing at her wolf-skin vesture,

If such it was, for they grow so hirsute

That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit.

And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees

(Come all the way from the north parts with sperm oil),

I hope to get safely out of the turmoil.

One more we add, with the wish, as we read the “Flight of the Duchess,” that it had been more kept in view throughout that poem:—

And were I not, as a man may say, cautious

How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous.

Even here, however, as in “Holy Cross Day,” and the latter of the two poems just named, there are passages hardly equalled elsewhere for their loftiness and beauty. Mr. Browning feels, and leads his [p. 137→] readers to feel, that underneath what is most trivial or most repulsive there are abysses of infinite awfulness. Nothing in the life of man is altogether little.

Enough has been given to show those who are as yet strangers to his works, what Mr. Browning’s readers have felt from the first, that he is as remote as possible from the conventionalisms of any school. Well-nigh every poem opens with an abruptness that takes one’s breath away. We have to take a header into deep water. If we can swim we shall strike out with a fresh sense of strength and enjoyment, and a course of such plunges acts on the whole mental framework, the sinews and nerves of thought, as a health-giving tonic. If we can’t, we lose our footing and our breath, the salt brine gets into our eyes and mouth, and we emerge with a sense of dislike and bewilderment, shivering and half disposed to confine ourselves for the future to the smoother lakes and freshwater pools, where we walk in quietly and have no chance of getting out of our depth. But with any reader of the former type it is surprising how soon Mr. Browning leads us into the heart of a subject, and keeps us spell-bound to the end. It seems, e.g., a somewhat abrupt opening to start with—

What’s become of Waring

Since he gave us all the slip?

Chose land-travel or seafaring,

Boots and chest, or staff and scrip,

Rather than pace up and down

Any longer London town?

And what follows is no narrative, simply the sketch of a character,—the portrait of a man of many gifts and varied tastes, capable of great things, and winning many hearts; but we learn, as we go on, to become one of the man’s familiar friends, and when we hear how he reappeared in a pilot-boat on the Adriatic, and was once more lost sight of, it seems simply natural, and of course, to join in the exclamation—

Oh, never star

Was lost here, but it rose afar!

Look East, where whole new thousands are,

In Vishnu-land, what Avatar?

III. The attempt to estimate the theology of a poet whose works no critic or publisher would class under the head of religious poetry may seem open to the charge that we are judging them by a standard which is altogether inapplicable. It is easy to sneer at the thought of testing a poet’s excellence by the measure of his conformity with the Thirty-nine Articles, or with the evangelical or catholic tendencies of the schools that claim shelter under those names. To some minds, indeed, the thought of any ethical purpose in a poet seems to introduce an alien and deteriorating element. [p. 138→] Such an one seems to them, as Mr. Swinburne has said of Wordsworth, to be simply using nature to make pottage, and they prefer the “divine lust,” the “etwas dämonisch,” of a poet who, like Byron, foams and rushes on in the wild recklessness of a morbid and frenzied passion. With those, however, who hold that all energy is at its highest point when it is under the control of will, and that a will which, exercising this control, directs the energy to truth and goodness, is immeasurably higher than one that degrades itself by a voluntary bondage to what is false and evil, the ethical worth and influence of a poet cannot be excluded from our survey of his character and merits as such. Such at least has been the faith in which the greatest of our poets have lived and acted. Spenser, the “sage and serious,” sought with—

Fierce wars and ladies’ love to moralize his song;

and Milton held that the poet’s work was essentially religious,—“offering at high strains in new and lofty measure.” Shelley, after his fashion, looked on his mission as that of a reforming prophet, and Wordworth and Tennyson, in our own time, have been conspicuous examples of—

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.

Mere reckless delight in the exuberance of power and the glow of passion, or in the fame which they bring with them, may produce the Byronic moodiness, or the fevered glow that burnt out the lives of Chatterton and Keats, but it is fatal to the attainment of any high and lasting excellence.* The school of revived paganism which began with the last-named poet, and has culminated in Mr. Swinburne, has in it, artistically as well as morally, all the evils of apostasy. The poet who, born in Christendom, would fain live and write as though “suckled in a creed outworn,” is sure to glide down the slopes of Avernus, till the darkest phases of human passion and sensual sin have an irresistible fascination for him. Art and poetry seem alike in danger, in such cases, of as infinite a debasement as when they ministered to the diseased imagination of Tiberius among the rocks of Capri. And if we believe that, in a far higher sense than the [p. 139→] words commonly receive, Christianity is morality, that the highest ethical and the highest religious truth are mutually interdependent, then it is no idle or alien question to ask of any poet whose power calls for such a scrutiny as this. What is his relation to the belief of Christians? how far has he entered into its life? how far is he likely to make that life nobler and more true?

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*Those who have been led by Archbishop Trench’s Stratford sermon, or Bishop Wordsworth’s larger work, to look on Shakspere almost as a theologian with catholic sympathies, a devout reader and sound interpreter of the Bible, may wonder at the omission of the greatest name in English literature from this induction. We are constrained to own that, with him as with Goethe, evidence of this ethical purpose is precisely what we fail to find. There is, it is true, no preference of evil over good, of vice over virtue. He holds his mirror up to nature, and shows virtue her own image and vice her own deformity; and the very truthfulness of the representation leads us, as the realities do, to hate the one and love the other; and so, in spite of their impurities, the ultimate tendency and dominant tone of his dramas is on the right side, purifying and not corrupting, but we do not trace the desire that this should be so. As Goethe said, with less truth, of Sophocles, “He knew the stage, and understood his craft.”

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It is obvious that neither Mr. Tennyson nor Mr. Browning stands in this respect on the same footing as the author of the “Christian Year.” He, in heart and soul the child of Anglicanism, lived under the shadow of the English Church, thought and felt as she taught him, looked on nature as foreshadowing or interpreting that teaching—as bringing man’s restless temper into harmony with her repose. He seems not so much to have resisted the temptation to stray beyond her boundaries, as never to have felt it. All dramatic dealing with man’s fiercer and more lawless passions would have been in his eyes a sin. He could not revel in the beauty and glory of nature for their own sake, but must learn their lesson of “sweet content” and “calm decay.” The mythologies of ancient creeds were for him, with all his scholar-like knowledge of the literature of Greece and Rome, forbidden ground; and to sing of them would have been like burning incense on the altars of Baal. Even in the vast field which the books of the Old and New Testaments open to the imagination, he deliberately narrowed the region within which he moved. He read the Bible through the Prayer-book. The wild life of patriarchs,—the dramatic incidents and characters of judges, kings, prophets,—the thousand suggestions of pathos and passion in the Gospels, were to him as Sunday lessons, from which, reverentially, tenderly, devoutly, he derived strength or hope, warning or consolation. He avowedly wrote to lead others to feel the “soothing character” of the teaching of the Prayer-book, and would have turned away from any merely dramatic representation of the facts of characters of Scripture as irreverent. Dr. Newman, indeed, little as he is known to most readers in this character, had in him the elements of a far greater poet than his friend. Nothing that Mr. Keble ever wrote can compare in power with the short, half-fragmentary poems of “Lead, kindly Light,” “The elements,” “Hidden saints,” “Rest,” “David,” “Saints departed,” in the “Lyra Apostolica,” or the more recent “Dream of Gerontius.” Here and there, indeed, we have touches of vivid scene-painting,—the “blossoms red and bright,” the prophet’s “wild hair floating in the eastern breeze,”—but for the most part the pictorial and the dramatic elements are alike absent, and we see only the communings of a devout and meditative mind. And this, we think, explains the influence for good which the “Christian Year” has exercised, not only over tens of thousands of “children and child-like souls” like-minded with his own, but over many who [p. 140→] stand almost at the opposite extreme of religious thought. Writers who have never known the order and teaching of the Church, to whom the religious life is an unknown region, will simply sneer at poetry that ties itself down to the order of the twenty-five Sundays after Trinity, and will turn to the sensuous or passionate verse which is more in harmony with their tastes. But men of nobler minds—such, e.g., as Mr. Maurice and Dean Stanley,—though they have passed on to regions of thought and criticism from which Mr. Keble would have shrunk, and hold opinions which he would have condemned as perilous and unsound, still turn to him with a true and loving reverence. They cannot forget what they once owed to him. He exercises over them that soothing influence which he most prayed for. He brings back to them something of the child-like spirit which the stir and conflict of the time, or the fascination of the pictorial aspects of sacred history, tend to wear away. Mr. Browning’s influence, we need hardly say, is of a very different character. His creed is less definite, his temper less submissive, his handling of sacred themes bolder and more free, and the essentially dramatic character of most of his poems makes it difficult for us to determine how far he is speaking in his own person, or representing some phase of the great drama of man’s religious life. No living writer—and we do not know any one in the past who can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with him—approaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms, the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of that life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in “Johannes Agricola in Meditation:”—

For as I lie, smiled on, full fed

By unexhausted power to bless,

I gaze below on hell’s fierce bed,

And those its waves of flames oppress,

Swarming in ghastly wretchedness;

Whose life on earth aspired to be

One altar-smoke, so pure!—to win,

If not love like God’s love for me,

At least to keep His anger in;

And all their striving turned to sin.

Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white

With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,

The martyr, the wan acolyte,

The incense-swinging child,—undone

Before God fashioned star or sun.

The white heart of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in “The Heretic’s Tragedy.” More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” in many of its circumstances and touches, suggests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and face once familiar to us, seen in gorgeous [p. 141→] pontificals at high ceremonies, or lecturing to curious crowds in Albemarle Street, it is also a picture of a class of minds which we meet with everywhere. Conservative scepticism that persuades itself that it believes, cynical acuteness in discerning the weak points either of mere secularism or dreaming mysticism, or passionate eagerness to reform, avoiding dangerous extremes, and taking things as they are because they are comfortable, and lead to wealth, enjoyment, reputation—this, whether a true account or not of the theologian to whom we have referred (for our own part we are disposed to think his character more genuine and more loveable), is yet to be found under many eloquent defences of the faith, many fervent and scornful denunciations of criticism and free thought. With a like minuteness, even to the degree of wearisomeness, does Mr. Browning pour his scorn, in “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” on the pseudo-spiritualism, with its acquiescence in imposture, its hysterical craving for sensation, its delirious dotage, its dreams of a coming revelation of God through the agency of mahogany tables, which during the last ten years has in our country led captive its hundreds of silly women and sillier men, “laden with divers lusts,” and in America has numbered its adherents by tens of thousands. In “Caliban upon Setebos,” if it is more than the product of Mr. Browning’s fondness for all abnormal forms of spiritual life, speculating among other things on the religious thoughts of a half brute-like savage, we must see a protest against the thought that man can rise by himself to true thoughts of God, and develop a pure theology out of his moral consciousness. So far it is a witness for the necessity of a revelation, either through the immediate action of the Light that lighteth every man, or that which has been given to mankind in spoken or written words, by the Word that was in the beginning. In the “Death in the Desert,” in like manner, we have another school of thought analyzed with a corresponding subtlety. Dramatically, indeed, this seems to us among the least successful of Mr. Browning’s portraits. Whatever we may think of the possible feelings of St. John towards Hymenæus or Cerinthus, we can hardly force our imagination to the task of conceiving what he would have said had he been reviewing the “Leben Jesu,” still less to the belief (even poetically and for a moment) that that development of doubt entered into his apocalypse of the future, or that he felt himself, even in vision,—

Feeling for foothold through a blank profound,

Along with unborn people in strange lands.

It may be that neither artist nor poet has as yet painted the beloved disciple as he was, and we may accept Mr. Browning’s portraiture as, at any rate, a far closer approximation to the truth than the feminine gentleness with which he is popularly identified, or than M. Rénan’s [p. 142→] picture of an irritable and pretentious egotist. Apart from this, however, the “Death in the Desert” is worth studying in its bearing upon the mythical school of interpretation, and as a protest, we would fain hope, from Mr. Browning’s own mind against the thought that because the love of God has been revealed in Christ, and has taught us the greatness of all true human love, therefore

We ourselves make the love, and Christ was not.

In one remarkable passage at the close of “The Legend of Pornic,” Mr. Browning, speaking apparently in his own person, proclaims his belief in one great Christian doctrine, which all pantheistic and atheistic systems formally repudiate, and which many semi-Christian thinkers implicitly reject:—

The candid incline to surmise of late

That the Christian faith may be false, I find;

For our Essays-and-Reviews’ debate

Begins to tell on the public mind,

And Colenso’s words have weight.

I still, to suppose it true, for my part,

See reasons and reasons: this, to begin,—

’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart

At the head of a lie,—taught Original Sin,

The Corruption of Man’s Heart.

And with this sense of the reality of the mystery of evil, there is also, forming the noblest element in his noblest works, if not an acceptance, in terms of Nicene theology, yet a clear and vivid apprehension of the glory of the “mystery of godliness,” which makes us welcome one who can so speak as “not far from the kingdom of God,” a brother in heart and hope. Thus, in the “Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” travelling through Palestine, circa a.d. 70, the supposed writer comes across Lazarus, and registers his case as a curious instance of suspended animation, followed by an unparalleled change and elevation of soul, which he cannot explain by any previous theory:—

He holds on firmly to some thread of life

(It is the life to lead perforcedly)

Which runs across some vast distracting orb

Of glory on either side that meagre thread,

Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet—

The spiritual life around the earthly life;

The law of that is known to him as this—

His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.

But at the close, after a vain attempt to wrap himself in the details of his earthly science once more, the half-mystical, half-sceptical Arab returns to the thought which now haunts him:—

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?

So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too—

So, through the thunder comes a human voice,

Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here! [p. 143→]

Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself.

Thou hast no power, nor may’st conceive of Mine,

But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,

And thou must love Me who have died for thee!”

The madman saith He said so: it is strange.

In entire harmony with this is the close of that which we have already named as Mr. Browning’s greatest poem, than which we know none nobler in the whole range of English poetry. And here the genesis of the poem gives it a special interest. In “Bells and Pomegranates,” in 1844, in the “Poems” of 1849, we have but Part I. of “Saul.” As it was, it was a picture of wonderful beauty,—the boy-minstrel, and the dark, maddened king; the song in which David sang of the joys of the hunter, and the shepherd, and the reaper, and the Levites in the Temple:—

Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour! no spirit feels waste,

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.

Oh the wild joys of living! The leaping from rock up to rock,—

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree,—the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool’s living water,—the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal—the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine,

And the locust’s flesh steeped in the pitcher! The full draught of wine,

And the sleep in the dried river-channel, where bulrushes tell

That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.

How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!

But something yet remained behind. The wish and thought were loftier than as yet his power of execution. That reached its consummate and perfect skill when the poem received its completion. Then the good that David has wrought reacts on his own spirit, unfolds depths of human and divine possibilities that he had never before dreamt of, and his human love becomes an Apocalypse of the Everlasting Mercy:—

See the King—I would help him, but cannot, the wishes fall through.

Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,

To fill up his life starve my own out, I would—knowing which

I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now!

Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst Thou, so wilt Thou!

So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown—

And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down

One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath,

Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death!

As Thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved

Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved!

He who did most shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak.

“Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me

Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever; a Hand like this hand

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand! [p. 144→]

Side by side with this noble utterance of the central thought of a true belief in the Mystery of the Incarnation, we find, where Mr. Browning lets us hear his own voice, his confession of faith as to the ultimate issues of the divine work of love, of which It, and the Death upon the Cross were the manifestation. It will not surprise any one to hear that he shares the widest and fullest hopes of its ultimate victory over evil. Universalism is, indeed, essentially a poet’s creed, not only or chiefly because it harmonizes with the idealizing temperament which shuts its eyes to the stern realities around it, but because it falls in with the spirit which looks on the whole history of the world, and of each single soul in it, as the unfolding of a great drama, in which men and women are the puppets, and God himself at once the great poet, and the one spectator. And so, as he himself, if the Creator of such a world, would lead it on, in its totality and all its parts, to perfect joy and peace, the poet who yields to this tendency thinks of this as the necessary issue. With Clement of Alexandria, he cannot limit the operation of the infinite mercies of divine love to the narrow space of life; with Origen, he cannot think, as long as man’s freedom lasts, of the possibility of good being extinguished, and dreams of the redemptive work as extending even to the principalities and powers of spiritual evil; with Gregory of Nyssa, whose thoughts on this question went farther than Origen’s, he looks forward to the time when one accordant song of jubilation shall ascend from the whole universe of God.* So the two great poets of our own time proclaim a hope as far-reaching and glorious as those of the patristic theologians we have named. Mr. Tennyson welcomes his “friend,” the chief representative of that hope among religious thinkers of our own time, though “thirty thousand college councils thunder anathemas” against him, and utters in “In Memoriam” his own belief:—

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; [p. 145→]

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroyed,

Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete.

. . . .

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall

At last—far off—at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

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*With Origen, who has often been reproached with introducing into the creed of Christians the thought of cycles of sin, punishment, restoration, and then sin again (compare the language of Augustine, “De Civ. Dei,” xxi. 17, “Alternantes sine cessatione beatitudines et miserias, et statutis sæculorum intervallis ab istis ad illas, et ab illis ad istas itus ac reditus interminabiles”), the starting-point of the hope is found in his belief in the indestructible freedom of choice in man and other spiritual beings, and the power of the Divine Goodness. Given these conditions of the problem, and he can see no limit to the extension of the saving work. But holding that the freedom of choice would exist still, and that man could not be raised to a higher perfection than that in which he had been created and from which he fell, Origen, with the logical sequence of an Alexandrian thinker, could not but admit the possibility of another fall, needing another period of discipline and restitution (“De Princ,” 1.6). In the few passages in which Gregory of Nyssa (Catech. viii. and xxvi.) gives utterance to his hope (for the most part he uses the Church’s current language of encouragement and warning), it rests more simply on his faith that all punishment is, in its nature, remedial, and that the loving purpose of God cannot ultimately be frustrated, nor Christ fail to “see of the travail of His soul.”

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Mr. Browning, looking, in a poem in his “Dramatis Personæ,” on “Apparent Failure” as seen at the Morgue in the lifeless bodies of those

—— who most abhorred

Their life in Paris yesterday,

and tracing, with his usual subtlety and power, the probable history of each, utters his trust that all is not over, his belief that the failure is not irretrievable:—

My own hope is, a sun will pierce

The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;

That after Last, returns the First,

Though a wide compass round be fetched;

That what began best, can’t end worst

Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.

The same feeling finds utterance in yet more noble words in the prayer of “Rabbi Ben Ezra:”—

So, take and use Thy work!

Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

One poem, the “Epilogue” to the “Dramatis Personæ,” still remains as an expression of Mr. Browning’s creed, and it shows what we believe to be the besetting danger of this wider hope, its tendency to glide into a pantheistic theory of the universe. The education of mankind, the birth and progress of successive systems of religion, the development of divine thoughts in history, these become everything, and the law of retribution and distinct personal responsibility fades into obscurity. The mind of such a thinker at least tends—

To sit apart, holding no form of creed,

And contemplating all.

It may come to think of evil and good as but necessary stages in man’s progress, and lead men to believe that the “wheat” and the [p. 146→] “chaff” shall alike be gathered into the garner, the “dogs” and the “sorcerers” welcomed with the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem.*

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*Mr. Keble’s language on this subject is, of course, within the limits of what he held to be the teaching of Scripture and the Church. His sympathy and hope for those who have “fallen asleep in Christ” lead him, however, to what was once recognised as a catholic and pious act:—

There are who love upon their knees

To linger when their prayers are said,

And lengthen out their litanies

In duteous care for quick and dead.—Lyra Innoc., p .v

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In the poem of which we speak, obscure and oracular as are its utterances, this thought is, we think, distinctly heard, and as yet it is the poet’s last word to us. We have the old faith represented by the chorus of Levites in the temple, singing as to a Living God who has chosen them as His inheritance:—

When the singers lift up their voice,

And the trumpets made endeavour,

Sounding, “In God rejoice!”

Saying, “In Him rejoice

Whose mercy endureth for ever!”

Then comes the contrast of the modern scientific scepticism which has cast aside this faith, and Rénan is made its representative. It scorns the old and exults over its disappearance:—

Gone now! all gone across the dark so far,

Sharpening fast, shuddering ever, shutting still,

Dwindling into the distance, dies that star

Which came, stood, opened once! We gazed our fill

With upturned faces on as real a Face

That, stooping from grave music and mild fire,

Took in our homage . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . Awhile transpired

Some vestige of a Face no pangs convulse,

No prayers retard; then even this was gone,

Lost in the night at last.

Then lastly, a spirit speaks. What comes is given as the solution of the problem, the conclusion of the whole matter. The scorn of modern sceptics for the old faith is blind and unreasoning. They too have but glimpses of the truth, and lose one while they grasp at another. The great ocean surges round them, and now this point and now that comes into prominence, and men think that the island-rock which is left bare is the one home of truth, when lo! the waves come and sweep it from view, and the glory and the beauty appear again elsewhere. Nature, in her infinitude, thus dances round each one of us, forms each separate personality, moulding it now after this type, and now after that:—

Why, where’s the need of temple, when the walls

O’ the world are that? what use of swells and falls

From Levites’ choir, priests’ cries, and trumpet-calls? [p. 147→]

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,

Or decomposes but to recompose,

Become my universe, that feels and knows.

This is indeed but the condensed expression of the thought which dominates in what is in some respects the most complete and striking of Mr. Browning’s religious poems—“Christmas Eve, and Easter Day.” There the opening scene is a small dissenting chapel on a bleak common, and on a wet and windy night. The congregation are painted, one by one, with all the truth, and all the grotesqueness of which Mr. Browning is so great a master. We have the old woman with her umbrella, the meek apprentice with his hacking cough, the Boanerges in the pulpit. It seems commonplace and mean enough, just what a mere artist, with a sovereign contempt for English middle-class life in general and its religious life in particular, would hold up to scorn; but the observer who speaks to us in the poem goes into the moonlight, and there he has a vision of a Form, dim, shadowy, wonderful, which he recognises as at once Human and Divine, and that Form has been present where the two or three were gathered together, and has not turned away. The scene changes first to St. Peter’s, with all its gorgeous worship and its effete symbols, and its superb unrealities, and then to the lecture-room of a German professor, unfolding to his class, with the pallor of death already on his brow, the abysses of the mythical theory of the Gospels, taking from them what has been the faith of their fathers, and offering them a dreary and hopeless substitute. And yet even here, in both these scenes, the presence of the Form is seen, and a glory falls as from the border of its raiment. The worship of Rome is not altogether false. Faith mingles with the denial of the disciple of Strauss. The man who denies a personal immortality dies a martyr to his consuming zeal for truth, The Divine Judge pardons and accepts them both.

We have given but the barest outline of the first of these strangely fascinating poems. It will be seen on the one hand that they are inspired with a broad and true catholicity, which can see an element of truth or goodness at the most opposite extremes, and can sympathize with it under whatever disguises and with whatever accompaniments it may be found. On the other, we are compelled to add that they tend to the conclusion that all varieties of the Christian creed are equally true, equally acceptable, and so to a belief which, if it be a faith in a personal God, resembles that of some Eastern mystics who speak of the Divine Mind as delighting in the variety of creeds and worships as a man may delight in the varied colours and odours of a fair garden, and which at last glides into the pantheistic thought of a Divine Work evolving itself through the ages in all forms of human thought and life, not of a Will revealing itself through prophets and apostles, but above all in the Eternal Word. [p. 148→]

We owe too much to Mr. Browning’s spirit-stirring words, and think too highly of his purpose, as well as power, as a poet, to believe that in all that he has said as to the mystery of the manifestation of that Eternal Word in the Divine humanity of Christ, he has been simply dramatic, personating a faith which he no longer holds, or has never held at all. But if we may venture to say one word before we end, not of him only, but to him, it would be to suggest that this intensely dramatic power, while it is a great and wonderful gift, brings with it a subtle and perilous temptation. It leads, as he has himself pointed out in “Sordello,” to the suppression of individual, personal life where it might be most powerful:—

Sundered in twain, each spectral part at strife

With each; one joined against another life;

The Poet thwarting hopelessly the Man.

. . . . . . . . .

But the complete Sordello, Man and Bard,

John’s cloud-girt angel, this foot on the land,

That on the sea, with open in his hand

A bitter-sweetling of a book—was gone.

The artist paints a thousand portraits, but we long to see himself. We could almost pay the price of forfeiting Hamlet or Iago if so we could have had the whole mind of Shakspere. It is open, we believe, to Mr. Browning to attain a yet higher pinnacle of greatness, to exercise a wider and nobler influence on men of strong will and robust intellect, than he has yet done. As a “fashioner,” to return to his own language, he has attained an excellence which no other living poet equals. Will he not realize the promise of his own words and appear, if years are given and the old strength remains, as a “seer,” telling us with clearer and stronger voice what he has indeed seen, leading us not downwards to a fiery whirl of passions, or a chaos of grotesque horrors, or plunging the scalpel into the soul’s ulcerous scabs, but upward as to the majesty of the Throne, purifying our hearts and attuning them to adoration? Asking himself what he himself believes, and uttering the answer which we hope he is prepared to give, in no faltering voice, he may come to be the greatest Christian poet that England has yet seen in the century or in all the past, and leave a name to live with those of Dante and of Milton.

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Note.—I have learnt, since the publication of Part I., that two of Mr. Browning’s dramas, besides “Strafford,” have been brought upon the stage; “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” at Drury Lane in 1842 or 1843, and “Colombe’s Birthday” at the Haymarket more recently.

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[Henry Alford]

Reviewed:

General Review Essay (RB).

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